In One Person

“I’m going to become a girl,” she told them bravely. “One day, I’ll be Georgia. But, for now, I’m just Gee, and you can see me as Caliban in Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
.”
    “Perhaps it will be a winter-term play,” I cautioned the football players, not that I expected any of them to come see it. I just thought that I might need that long to get the kids ready; all the students in Richard’s Shakespeare class were freshmen. I would open auditions to the entire school, but I feared that the kids who would be most interested in the play were (like Gee) only freshmen.
    “There’s one more thing,” my protégée said to the football players. Her nose was streaming blood, but I could tell Gee was happy about that. “Mr. A. is
not
an old
gay
guy—he’s an old
bi
guy. You got that?”
    I was impressed that the football players nodded. Well, okay, not the big one on the dining-hall floor; he was just lying there, not moving. I only regret that Miss Frost and Coach Hoyt didn’t see me hit that duck-under. If I do say so myself, it was a pretty good duck-under—my one move.

Chapter
14
    T EACHER
    All that had happened three years ago, when Gee was just a freshman. You should have seen Gee at the start of her senior year, in the fall term of 2010—at seventeen, that girl was a knockout. Gee would turn eighteen her senior year; she would graduate, on schedule, with the Class of 2011. All I’m saying is, you should have seen her when she was a senior. Mrs. Hadley and Richard were right: Gee was special.
    That fall term of 2010, we were in rehearsals for what Richard called “the fall Shakespeare.” We would be performing
Romeo and Juliet
in that most edgy time—the brief bit of school that remains between the Thanksgiving break and Christmas vacation.
    As a teacher, I can tell you that’s a terrible time: The kids are woefully distracted, they have exams, they have papers due—and, to make it worse, the fall sports have been replaced by the winter ones. There is much that’s new, but a lot that’s old; everyone has a cough, and tempers are short.
    The Drama Club at Favorite River had last put on
Romeo and Juliet
in the winter of ’85, which was twenty-five years ago. I still remembered what Larry had said to Richard about casting a boy as Juliet. (Larry thought Shakespeare would have
loved
the idea!) But Richard had asked, “Where do I find a boy with the balls to play Juliet?” Not even Lawrence Upton could find an answer for that.
    Now I knew a boy with the balls to play Juliet. I had Gee, and —
as a girl
—Gee was just about perfect. At seventeen, Gee still actually had balls , too. She’d begun the extensive psychological examinations—the counseling and psychotherapy—necessary for young people who are serious about gender reassignment. I don’t believe that her beard had yet been removed by the process of electrolysis; Gee may not have been old enough for electrolysis, but I don’t really know. I
do
know that, with her parents’ and her doctor’s approval, Gee was receiving injections of female hormones; if she stayed committed to her sex change, she would have to continue to take those hormones for the rest of her life. (I had no doubt that Gee, soon to be
Georgia
, Montgomery would stay committed.)
    What was it Elaine once said, about the possibility of
Kittredge
playing Juliet? It wouldn’t have worked, we agreed. “Juliet is nothing if she’s not
sincere
,” Elaine had said.
    Boy, did I ever have a Juliet who was
sincere
! Gee had always had balls, but now she had breasts—small but very pretty ones—and her hair had acquired a new luster. My, how her eyelashes had grown! Gee’s skin had become softer, and the acne was altogether gone; her hips had spread, though she’d actually lost weight since her freshman year—her hips were already womanly, if not yet curvaceous.
    What’s more important, the whole community at Favorite River Academy knew who (and what) Gee Montgomery was. Sure, there were still a few jocks who hadn’t entirely accepted how sexually
diverse
a school we were trying to be. There will always be a few troglodytes.
    Larry would have been proud of me, I thought. In a word, it might have surprised Larry to see how
involved
I was. Political activism didn’t come naturally to me, but I was at least a
little
active politically. I’d traveled to some college campuses in our state. I’d spoken to the LGBT groups at Middlebury College and the